CLARITY researcher fills a hole for Disney

CLARITY researchers were on the move again recently with DCU PhD student Kevin McGuinness returning from a three month internship at Disney's animation labs in Los Angeles, U.S.A. During his time at Disney, Kevin worked on implementing innovative image editing techniques that will be used to help repair, edit and reuse images and videos within Disney's vast animation archives. Kevin developed
a software tool that allows objects to be cropped from one image and seamlessly blended onto another background. It can also be used to fill holes or missing parts of images by automatically selecting visually coherent image data from other images in the database. This can be used to repair damaged images where parts of the image are missing due to their age or as a result of the digitization process. The approach is based on analyzing edges in the image on the fly and selecting the most visually appealing image data to paste in as a replacement.

Of course no trip to Disney would be complete without visting a
theme park, so Kevin (left) and fellow CLARITY research Colum Foley (right)
also on an internship in the US -- see here, both took the
opportunity to spend a day at the magical kingdom.